Wall Street profiteers crashed the housing market with subprime snake oil, then scooped up vast numbers of single-family homes (SFRs) at foreclosure prices, and now they’re gouging tenants with exorbitant rents. High shelter costs are a major component of the inflation now ravaging ordinary wo[...]
Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Laissez faire capitalism in Arizona
Arizona is a desert state, everyone knows that, and its share of Colorado River water is inadequate for its cities and farms. What does that leave? Groundwater, which isn’t regulated. Now let’s visit Wenden, a town in southwestern Arizona, next door to a giant farm owned by a Saudi compa[...]
Biden’s political theater on gas prices
Biden is threatening “to pursue higher taxes on oil company profits if industry giants do not work to cut gas prices,” CNBC reported on Monday, October 31, 2022 (read story here). This is political theater, nothing more, to make it look like he’s fighting high gas prices. It lacks [...]
A GOP House will mean chaos
Voters are understandably unhappy about inflation and gas prices, but electing a GOP House majority won’t solve those problems, and would unleash chaos. The Democrats probably would fare better in pre-election polling if Biden were popular, and I would argue he deserves to be more popular than[...]
What the heck is going on in Britain?
In a nutshell, Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party prime minister, was run out of office by a series of scandals; and his replacement, Liz Truss, is incompetent and faces eviction from No. 10 Downing Street (Britain’s equivalent of the White House) after fumbling economic policy. BritainR[...]
October 10th, 2022 - 10:23 am § in Economics
Bernanke wins Nobel Prize
Ben Bernanke, a Great Depression scholar who guided the Federal Reserve through the 2007-2008 financial crisis, won the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics “for research on banks and financial crises” (see story here). He’ll share the prize with two other American economists less fa[...]
September 27th, 2022 - 5:41 pm § in Economics
A cynic’s view of falling home and stock prices
After the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve flooded the financial system with money to create a “wealth effect.” Your house isn’t worth more, but if it has a higher dollar value (because dollars are worth less), you’ll feel richer and spend more. That’s the theory behind “w[...]
I like Robert Reich, but he’s wrong about price controls
I liked him when he was Clinton’s labor secretary, because of his labor-friendly policies and defense of working-class people, with whom I’ve identified since my youth. Reich (bio here), a Dartmouth and Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate, has been a professor at [...]
GOP senator’s Social Security rescue plan: Go back to work
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has the temerity to ask Wisconsin voters to re-elect him after calling Capitol rioters “tourists,” has come up with another bold idea. (He’s nothing if not imaginative.) “There are a number of innovative ideas I would support,” he told const[...]